Ibrahim Fawal (1933 to 2020), Abe to his friends, was a writer, filmmaker, educator, and one of the most remarkable of NewSouth’s authors. Born in Ramallah, Palestine, he came to the U.S. to attend film school, after which he was the Jordanian assistant director for Lawrence of Arabia. His brother’s sudden death in Birmingham brought him to that city to look after the bereaved family, guide the family business, and become a U.S. citizen. But Abe’s heart was in art, and he began making films, teaching college literature and film classes, and writing what eventually became the PEN Oakland Award-winning On the Hills of God, a sweeping novel exploring the creation of Israel in 1947 from the Palestinian perspective. It and its sequel, The Disinherited, were published by NewSouth. In his late 60s, Abe earned a doctorate at England’s University of Oxford, publishing his dissertation on the foremost Arab filmmaker, Youssef Chahine. Abe was a storyteller, raconteur, and connoisseur of fine spirits, food, and women. We miss him.

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Coronavirus has changed the landscape of book publishing this year, as it has changed nearly every facet of all our lives. In an effort to bring our books directly to you when you are probably spending more time at home, we seized the opportunity to ask our talented authors to read short previews from their books. We hope these videos allow you to engage with the writing world and our published books in a whole new way. Check out the links below for full videos.

Marti Rosner reads from The Slave Who Went to Congress

Kirk Curnutt reads from All of the Belles: The Montgomery Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Wanda Lloyd reads from Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism

Rod Davis reads from East of Texas, West of Hell

Ken Woodley reads from The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia

Frye Gaillard reads from A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

William Alsup reads from Won Over: Reflections of a Federal Judge on His Journey from Jim Crow Mississippi

Julie Hedgepeth Williams reads from A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells’ Story of Survival

Julie Hedgepeth Williams reads from Three Not-So-Ordinary Joes: A Plantation Newspaperman, a Printer’s Devil, an English Wit, and the Founding of Southern Literature

Aileen Kilgore Henderson reads from Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State

Joe Taylor reads from The Theoretics of Love

Jacqueline Trimble reads from American Happiness

Jerry Armor reads from A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School

Jennifer Horne reads from Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets

Julian McPhillips reads from Civil Rights in My Bones: More Colorful Stories from a Lawyer’s Life and Work, 2005–2015

John Pritchard reads from Junior Ray

Clifton Taulbert reads from The Invitation

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The variety of individuals who have called American Founders a must-read are as diverse as they are distinguished. This recently released work of historical genius from Christina Proenza-Coles traces the impact African-descended peoples have had on the American continent, beginning long before the first English ship reached our shores. It is this wide-ranging and unique perspective that led Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain, to call American Founders an “important work” that “offers an extraordinary, compelling new narrative of the African role in creating the Americas of the Western Hemisphere.”

We were thrilled to see American Founders named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award in the category of history in June of this year. Even more recently, jazz legend and maestro trumpeter Wynton Marsalis surprised us by naming the book his personal favorite on the subject of freedom in a short video for his personal blog. What an achievement for American Founders! Marsalis expertly describes Proenza-Coles’s research and, not surprisingly, ties the significance of the work back to jazz.

Christina Proenza-Coles’s book was also the subject of a penetrating radio program for WYPR’s On the Record, Baltimore’s NPR affiliate. The author herself was a guest, offering insights and little-known stories from American history that show in what remarkable ways AfroAmericans have contributed to the character and early history of our country, including in the struggle for freedom and social justice.

Of course, history is still being made. The momentous events of this moment in the year 2020 place in bold relief the many ways in which African-descended Americans continue to shape our destiny, leading the charge toward a more equitable and just society. For more information, visit http://www.americanfoundersbook.com/.

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Don Siegelman, who served as Alabama’s governor from 1999 to 2003, was wrongfully convicted in proceedings he calls politically motivated. He spent more than five years in prison, including, tragically, time in solitary confinement. Now released, Siegelman has become something quite dangerous in the political game: a motivated policy genius who doesn’t need to worry about popularity or elections. Siegelman is focused on pushing forward reform for our justice system, arguing that political corruption in our courts subverts the rights of defendants and that our prisoners are not receiving the care they desperately need, particularly during this pandemic. Siegelman’s important voice has been broadcast over the airwaves following the release of his new memoir, Stealing Our Democracy, including appearances on NPR stations and Sirius XM.

In an interview with On Point, a program produced by NPR affiliate WBUR, Siegelman had this to say about his experience in the justice system: “If you believe that in every situation one should find a purpose . . . I quickly found mine. My purpose now is to expose what’s going on [in the justice system] and try to change it.” If charges can falsely be brought against a sitting governor, what’s to stop the same from happening to anyone?

As governor of Alabama, Siegelman was arguably one of the most influential political leaders in the heart of both the Confederacy and civil rights movement. He shouldered the weight of Alabama’s history of racial injustice with grace, meeting with and celebrating figures like Rosa Parks, C. T. Vivian, and the late John Lewis. Talking with Joe Madison, “The Black Eagle,” on Sirius XM, Siegelman recalled walking with Lewis and then-president Bill Clinton across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Lewis had been brutally beaten on Bloody Sunday. Siegelman called it the most impactful period of his governorship, remarking that “we all now have to share a greater burden in the struggle for truth, justice, and freedom now that John Lewis and C. T. Vivian have passed.” He agrees with President Obama that the fight continues and that the best way to ensure Lewis’s legacy is to strengthen the legislation he fought so hard for.

And Siegelman isn’t the only one who thinks his prosecution was a sham. A piece in The Washington Spectator analyzes the evidence showing that Karl Rove and other key political figures were covertly involved with prosecutors in his case. Spectator reporter Lou Dubose comments, “If I didn’t know the story . . . I might have considered the title of Siegelman’s new book—Stealing Our Democracy—broad and overstated. Which it is not.” The title of Siegelman’s memoir isn’t an overstatement; unscrupulous politicians, many of them right-wing, are threatening our core values of government through their unlawful use of the justice system. Siegelman’s book is a cautionary tale.

Read more about Stealing Our Democracy here.

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Call it tough love. Alan Cross, a Southern Baptist pastor and NewSouth author, wants to hold accountable Christians who fail to follow the teachings of the Bible in times of social change and strife. Cross had this to say when speaking with NPR recently about how Christians have responded to the killing of George Floyd: “The way that we live and work in the world, how we care for our communities, how we care for our neighbors. Those are all things that the Bible speaks really clearly about.” There is no Biblical or theological justification for not decrying police brutality of African Americans or the great social injustices they still experience.

In his book When Heaven and Earth Collide, Cross critically examines the role Southern churches historically played in the civil rights movement, when many actively supported segregation and racial violence. He claims that the Christian reluctance to denounce racism comes from the religion’s habit “to use God as a means to an end” to avoid uncomfortable conflict. As a Christian, he says, “you should see the pain of people around you and say ‘What can I do?’”

Cross has also recently become outspoken about the response of churches to coronavirus. As churches around the country ignore state and federal regulations and continue to hold worship services despite the risk of COVID infection, Cross argues that our focus must be on safely conducting ourselves before reopening prematurely. “Whether we fight this virus in such a way as to marshal all of our resources to save every life we can should not be open for discussion.” Pastors must balance the dual responsibilities of gathering for worship and putting others’ interests before their own—both Biblical tenets, our author asserts.

Learn more about Cross and his opinions at The New York Times, The Bulwark, NPR, and WBHM. When Heaven and Earth Collide is available for purchase from NewSouth Books and your favorite physical and online booksellers.

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We mourn the recent loss of Constance “Connie” Curry, eighty-six, a friend of NewSouth Books and a chronicler of those who made a progressive difference in the civil rights era. An activist with a long history at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights organizations, Curry was on the right side of history; better yet, she has recorded and preserved history, some of which she experienced first-hand. A summa cum laude graduate of Agnes Scott and a Fulbright scholar, at the young age of twenty-three Curry was selected to be an adult advisor in SNCC, a position of great import considering the organization’s impact on the movement. Through her reports on sit-ins to friendly media and other outlets, Curry can be credited with spurring on a positive outlook on peaceful resistance. She was also a white volunteer in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964. Beginning that year, Curry worked eleven years for the American Friends Service Committee, promoting school desegregation in Alabama and Mississippi. Connie would later become an author. In her Lillian Smith Award-winning work of nonfiction, Silver Rights, and in other works she has midwifed or co-written—Bob Zellner’s The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, now a classic about the movement, and Deep in Our Hearts among them—she ensured that the remarkable stories of activists like Julian Bond, Zellner, Bob Moses, Charles Morgan, and many others would survive for future generations. The staff at NewSouth Books enjoyed a long personal relationship with Connie. Co-founders Suzanne La Rosa and Randall Williams fondly remember her fearless intelligence and independent spirit, and her love of good talk, good times, and good people, all reflective of her Irish spirit (she was the daughter of Irish immigrants). We miss her. More information about Connie can be found at the SNCC Digital Gateway website.

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Ken Woodley is strong of character and driven by heart. These qualities emerge in high relief in The Road to Healing, his history of Massive Resistance in Prince Edward County following Brown v. Board that also describes his years-long effort to secure reparations for those affected. For those of us who know Woodley (who is also a lay minister), it’s no surprise that he’s been invited as a guest contributor for the entire month of April on Forward Day by Day, which provides daily religious meditations in print and online in English, Spanish, braille, and via audio. Certainly we can use his wisdom now. Find his April meditations at https://prayer.forwardmovement.org/fdbd_archives.php. Please also enjoy this short video of Woodley reading from The Road to Healing, which he provided among alongside many of our authors as part of a project for readers in quarantine.

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All this talk about the office of the President, be it how Trump is or is not fit for it or who among his Democratic challengers represents our best chance for positive change, reminds us of the strength and character of Jack Brooks, perhaps the best-suited analyst of the Oval Office in our history. A Texas Democrat, Brooks served for nearly fifty years under ten presidents, some of them among our best (John F. Kennedy), our worst (Richard Nixon), and our most complex (Lyndon B. Johnson). With the recent release of the first biography on his life, titled The Meanest Man in Congress, the late Jack Brooks has finally begun to receive the recognition he deserves for his political acumen and ability to work both sides of the aisle in pushing through important (i.e., the Civil Rights Act) legislation. Several book events have brought Brooks’s story to interested audiences, including a singular program with opening reception at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. There, moderator Henrik Hertzberg (The New Yorker) spoke with co authors Tim and Brendan McNulty about Brooks’s legacy to a packed house. The program can be viewed thanks to C-SPAN’s Book TV. In a related development, The Jack Brooks Foundation was officially launched, an organization devoted to perpetuating Brooks’s ideals and legacy. A first initiative: The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History is partnering with the foundation to digitize Brooks’s papers so that they are available to political historians and scholars in the years to come.

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Neither Congresswoman Terri Sewell nor Benjamin Sterling Turner were born in Dallas County, Alabama, but both came to represent the 7th District of Alabama with fervor and dedication. Turner was born a slave and rose to be Alabama’s first African American representative in Congress. 140 years after Turner took office, Terri Sewell was put in charge of the 7th district, the first African American woman to do so. After the recent publication of The Slave Who Went to Congress—an illustrated children’s book detailing Turner’s early life and political career—Congresswoman Sewell visited Clark Elementary in Selma with authors Frye Gaillard and Marti Rosner and gifted students there fifty copies of the book. Sewell movingly told the schoolchildren attending her program that she “stands on the shoulders of Benjamin Sterling Turner,” who paved the way for her civil service with his bold
choice to run for office. This incredible intersection of history reminds us of how important historymakers like Turner and Sewell are; the effects of their leadership can be felt in Dallas County today. The Slave Who Went to Congress—which the Midwest Book Review calls “a choice pick for personal, school, and library collections”—is a powerful account of an impactful life and, importantly, introduces Turner’s remarkable story of bravery and leadership to children around the world.

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